^I never said continuity was a threat. I love continuity. I've been writing Trek fiction professionally for a decade now, and aside from a few slight details here and there, everything I've written -- even the things set in alternate timelines -- all fits together into a single consistent, heavily cross-referencing continuity, and stays as consistent as possible with the main novel continuity.

But there's nothing wrong with stories being out of continuity or being in alternative continuities either. There's value in good stories whether they can be made to fit or not. And yeah, sometimes you can justify an out-of-continuity story as being in an alternate timeline. Maybe some fans can believe they all are. But my understanding of how alternate timelines work is more scientifically based so it's more limited. There are some stories I can accept as alternate timelines, but a lot where the nature of the discrepancies can't, in my view, be plausibly explained that way. And in those cases, I'm perfectly satisfied just to enjoy them as alternative fictional takes. I don't think it diminishes them in any way that they're not supposedly "real" in some sense, so I don't feel the need to concoct elaborate rationalizations for how they can be pretend-"real."

__________________Christopher L. Bennett Homepage -- Site update 11/16/14 including annotations for "The Caress of a Butterfly's Wing" and overview for DTI: The Collectors